I may sing the same songs for over 40 years now but I always sing them in different ways in order to keep the excitement and passion alive.
I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
Every song is like a kid. How can you have that many kids and have a favorite? Which one do I like to hang most with?
Most of the songs I sing have that blues feeling in it. They have that sorry feeling. And I don't know what I'm sorry about. I don't.
The reason I stop playing songs is usually because I get sick of them, and then they find themselves back into the set list at some point.
The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.
So it's not so much that I set out to do something different, it's just that the songs themselves require their own individual voice and attention.
As long as the songs are strong, I think you can express yourself in any style and have it be soulful and have it be your own voice.
When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.
Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist.
I definitely get nervous about if I'm going to forget the words to the songs or something. And I don't enjoy being the center of attention for an hour straight - I think that's really stressful.
Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them.
U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.
I learned to embrace my individuality, and if that meant writing a song on one chord over and over again, then that's what I do.
If there's a song where there's a possibility of guitar stuff that would be fun to listen to, go for it. Don't worry about what anybody thinks.
Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.
Every day, somebody has a song they want you to hear, and you're stupid if you don't listen to it because you never know what you may find.
I never enjoyed making videos, even though the 'Total Eclipse' video was nominated for a Grammy along with the song. We lost out to the 'Billie Jean' video.
I feel safe and comfortable to do that once I know that the song structure around the bass part is very interesting and it satisfies me in a compositional sense.
When I'm old I shall give up writing the big stuff and shall wander round the park thinking of songs.
I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.
